A great new post from Torulf Jernström and Sam Myers highlights what has changed when looking for the next generation of gaming winners.

Since 2009, a perfect storm of huge new mobile audiences, the growth of casual games and in game monetisation, has underpinned a great period for building new gaming companies such as King and Supercell.

However, what has worked in the past is unlikely to work for the next generation because it has become incredibly competitive to attract and retain new users.

The white space for gaming is in areas such as VR and AR but the challenge remains how to stay alive and in market until these technologies become mass market. Another area that been has pioneered by Asian gaming companies has been chat games. Facebook has heavily promoted this in Messenger and we expect it to become a major new platform for gaming.

European has already had two huge success stories in gaming: King and Supercell. We are seeing a new wave of very exciting companies emerging in Europe and are very optimistic about the future.

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Gaming has been a great hunting ground for VCs in the last decade. A usual suspect when it comes to pushing innovation forward, gaming as an industry found itself in the middle of a perfect storm over the past 10 years that made it the perfect high-risk, winner-takes-all profile for a VC’s portfolio.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is pretty obvious why this is the case. Not only is it a massive market, but it is also a market where the old-guard (AAA) had little advantage over its smaller, faster-learning competitors as the market embraced mobile and casual-web.